Time Travel. A History

THE UNIVERSE TENDS toward maximum entropy, the condition of ultimate disorder from which there is no return. The eggs will all have scrambled, the sand castles blown down, the sun and stars faded to uniformity. H. G. Wells already knew about entropy and heat death. This is the destiny the Time Traveller nears, when he abandons Weena, departs the year 802,701, leaves behind the troglodytic Eloi and bovine Morlocks, the ruined Palace of Green Porcelain, its Gallery of Palaeontology long deserted, its library a wilderness of rotting paper, and drives his machine onward, swaying and vibrating through millions of years of grayness into a final twilight brooding over the earth. If you read The Time Machine when you are young, I think this is what lodges in your memory or your dreams, this final tableau where nothing happens. In one draft Wells called it “The Further Vision.” If Eden is alpha, here is omega. Eschatology for the enlightened. No hell, no apocalypse. Not with a bang but a whimper.

This twilight beach recurs again and again in science fiction. We come to land’s end—J. G. Ballard’s “derelict landscape,” the terminal beach, where the last man says farewell: “Such a leave-taking required him to fix his signature on every one of the particles in the universe.” In Wells’s unforgettable final pages, the Time Traveller sits shivering in his saddle and watching “the life of the old earth ebb away.” Nothing stirs. All he sees is stained red, pinkish, bloody, in the dim light of the dying sun. He imagines some black thing flopping about, but it is only a rock.

I stared aghast at the blackness that was creeping over the day….A cold wind began to blow….Silent? It would be hard to convey the stillness of it….The darkness thickened….All else was rayless obscurity….A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote my marrow.

This is the way the world ends.

* A retronym is a lexical time machine. It calls up entities past and present and juxtaposes them in the mind’s eye.

SEVEN

A River, a Path, a Maze

Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

—Jorge Luis Borges (1946)

TIME IS a river. Does the truism require elaboration?

It did in 1850. Case in point: an American novel titled The Mistake of a Life-Time; or, The Robber of the Rhine Valley. A Story of the Mysteries of the Shore, and the Vicissitudes of the Sea. The author, Waldo Howard, promises “a truthful panorama of the events of a stirring and romantic period.” Let us jump to chapter 13, “Lady Gustine and the Jew.”

Lady Gustine is a dignified and high-toned beauty of eighteen years (“summers”), while her companion for the evening (not the Jew, obviously) is an equally dignified and beautiful twenty-year-old. They have been dancing. She is fatigued. “I fear you are fatigued,” says the gentleman. “ ‘Oh, no,’ said the lady, panting to regain the breath she had expended in the waltz.”

Conveniently, their balcony overlooks a river. They gaze upon it awhile. Presently dialogue occurs:

“Are you dreaming?”

“O, no, lady. I—I was thinking how truly the passage of yonder tiny craft resembles that of our own life bark on the tide of time.”

“And how?”

“See you not how quietly its hull is borne along with the current?…[etc., etc.]

“Well.” [He’s boring her.]

“Thus we are moving now, lady, rapidly, with silent, but steady, and never ceasing motion, down the swift river of time, that sets through the valley of life; all unconsciously we glide on, nodding like this same helmsman, indifferently, as we hold the rudder that guides our own fate—while we swiftly approach the ocean of eternity.”

And more like that. Pretty soon he “dwells upon the beauties of her native valley” but we needn’t follow him there. The first metaphor is bad enough.

Time = river. Self = boat. Eternity = ocean.

When time is a river, then time travel becomes plausible. You might get out and run up or down the banks.

People have been comparing time to a river at least since Plato began a long tradition of misquoting Heraclitus: “You can’t step into the same river twice.” Or “We step and do not step into the same rivers.” Or “We both step and do not step, are and are not in the same rivers.”^*1 No one knows exactly what Heraclitus said, because he lived in a time and place that lacked writing (his work is published under the title The Complete Fragments, no irony intended), but according to Plato:

Heraclitus, I believe, says that all things pass and nothing stays, and comparing existing things to the flow of a river, he says you could not step twice into the same river.